More than 70 years after their B-26G Marauder was shot down near Seffern, Germany, a crew of airmen is coming home, the Defense Department POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced Tuesday Aug. 11. Army Air Forces 1st Lt. William P. Cook and a crew of five airmen took off from Saint Quentin, France, on Dec. 23, 1944, to bomb an enemy-held bridge in Eller, Germany. The plane crashed near the Germany-Belgium border, but Army Graves Registration Command was unable to find the aircraft and crew after the war, according to the release. The site of the crash was first located in 2006, and after excavations in 2012 and 2013, Cook and three crew members were returned to their fam?ilies in the US and Canada for military burials over the last year. Flight Officer Arthur LeFavre of Red Bank, N.J., and SSgt. Ward Swalwell Jr. of Chicago will be buried with full military honors this month in Arlington National Cemetery, Va., as will other recovered remains representing the crew.
A three-month continuing resolution that ended in December inflicted less pain on the Department of the Air Force than it had expected, as procurement and construction continue in the new year. The federal government operated under a stopgap spending measure that stretched from the beginning of the fiscal year on…